Old Filth - Jane Gardam [19]
They travelled first-class, though unintentionally as they both thought first-class was vulgar and only for expense-account people.
The ticket-collector, weighing up their age and clothes, had thought differently, seeing Teddy’s rolled umbrella and Betty’s glorious pearls and the rubbish on the floor around their polished shoes.
“You can upgrade, sir, if you like.” (The wife looks very pale.) “Just the next compartment and four pounds extra if you’re seniors.”
“Perfectly well here, thank you,” said Filth, but Betty smiled at the man’s black Tamil face, gathered up her bag and gloves and set off on her jaunty heels down the coach, tottering through the swaying connecting doors towards the firsts, away from what she still called “the thirds.”
They paddled through the water spilling out from under the doors of the W.C.s and settled in a blue velvet six-seater compartment. Four of the seats were slashed down the back with the stuffing coming out. Graffiti covered the ceiling but the floor was cleaner. Filth thought of the train to Kuala Lumpur, the mahogany and the hot food handed in, and sat facing his wife in the two unslashed seats on the window side. The fields, woods, hedges, uplands of Wiltshire, white chalk shining through the grass, flickered by.
Betty suddenly saw a hoopoe in a hedge. She looked at Filth to see if he had noticed it, but he was abstracted. The lines between his nose and mouth were sharp today, cruel as the slashes down the seats. Whatever had he to be bitter about?
His boy is dead. His boy, Harry.
The Tamil drew the door open.
“Better, sir?”
“Very nice,” said Betty.
“Four pounds? Is that each?” asked Filth.
“Don’t bother with it, sir. When you look at the seats . . . But it’s cleaner. Take my advice and get straight into first-class on the way home. You’ll be Day Returns?”
“Oh, yes. We don’t stay in London longer than we can help.” The man wondered why the lady’s eyes were so bright. Like it was tears. Real old. Could be his grandma. And yet—she was smiling at him.
“We’re going to London to sign our Wills.”
“Ma’am, I’m sure there’s plenty of time.”
Filth blew his nose on a starched handkerchief and drew down his eyebrows as if in Court. “In your profession, I wouldn’t count on that.”
“Too right,” said the man. “Takes our lives in our hands, we do on the railways. Safer flying. But that’s how I like it. When you gotta go, you gotta go? Right?”
“Right,” said Betty.
“Quite right,” said Filth. He was noticing Betty, her face tired through the make-up. He looked at her again as the train swayed insolently through Clapham junction. She must get her eyes seen to. They looked moist and strange. Old, he thought. She’s never looked old before.
“Lunch?” he asked.
“What?”
“Where are you having lunch? Shall we go somewhere together? Simpson’s?”
“But you’re going to the Inner Temple.”
“I can change it. Nobody’s expecting me. Don’t know a soul there now.”
She was silent.
“Then we could get a taxi to the place—the solicitor together. Not arrive separately. Hanging about on pavements.” “No,” she said. “I’ve made arrangements at the Club.”
“You don’t have to go. There’s never anybody else there.”
“That’s why I go. To keep it going. I’m meeting somebody this time.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
She thought: You didn’t ask.
At Waterloo she stood with him for his taxi, the driver coming round to help him in. The door was slammed and he tapped his window and called “Betty—where did you say you were going?” but she was gone. He saw her as he was taken down the slope, fast as a girl on her still not uninteresting legs, nipping through the traffic towards the National Theatre side. Must be walking all the way to the Club, he thought with pride. Crossing the bridge, down the Strand, Trafalgar Square, the Mall, St. James’s, Dover Street. Remarkable woman for over seventy. She loved walking. Strange the hold that University Women’s Club had over her. Never been there himself. Betty, of course, had never been to a university. She’d vanished now.
He had not seen her take a right down the steps